The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
Anyhow, the truth is that not Sussex but the Isle of Wight was the last
pagan spot in these islands, and here we of Sussex must reluctantly
yield the palm. Yet can we in Sussex always boast that our king was the
last of the kings in Britain to worship the Devil twelve hundred years
ago. And so again for Bardsey.
Looking at Bardsey over an evening sea now less tumbled and under the
dying gale, I thought also how odd it was that such Scandinavian names
should have stuck to some places more than to others. These pirates of
the eighth and ninth centuries were not many in number. They had no
culture or traditions; no literature; no anything. It was not until
England had gradually civilised them and made them Christian that
they produced anything whatsoever. How then did little bits of their
language stick on to portions of our coast? They say that ‘Dublin’ is a
Scandinavian name. ‘Bardsey’ certainly is, and so is the word ‘sound,’
to mean a passage of the sea, and ‘Skomer’ is Scandinavian, and, right
high up in the estuary of the Severn, ‘Flatholm’ and ‘Steepholm’ are
both surely Scandinavian. People explain it sometimes by saying that
as the attack of the pirates was always necessarily from the sea, they
would give their names to the sea places. I could understand how this
would give them Scandinavian names in Scandinavia, but how did we come
to adopt such names? That is the puzzle. I should have thought that
the local Celtic name for Bardsey would have held out. It has not done
so, at least not in our speech; and there are even Scandinavian names
for inland places, such as the main hill of the Isle of Man, and many
places in the Lakes and beyond.
But the whole story of words is full of mystery, and the attempt to
reduce the process of words to a science has always seemed to me
ridiculous enough. It is true that certain habits get formed, and
you can, from them, build up certain vague rules. For instance, the
French noun derives from the Latin usually—nearly always through the
accusative—and a particular Latin form will produce a corresponding
French form; but the process is not invariable; and though one type
out of hundreds becomes the official type of each nation, human speech
is naturally not a set of a few official languages, but a mass of
innumerable dialects, all melting one into the other.
Watch carefully, and you will note that in the area covered by the
great official languages, most people are bilingual. They can speak
the official language, but they also speak among themselves a dialect
of their own, usually a dialect more or less cousin to the official
language. That is certainly true of the working people of my own county
of Sussex, and, indeed, of all rural England; but it is also true of
the industrial districts, and, of course, it is true of the North. You
find just the same thing through France, and Belgium, and the Valley
of the Rhine, and I am told you find the same thing in Italy. The real
spoken languages of Christendom are to be counted by the hundred, or
the thousand; and though they fall into great groups, yet each has a
life of its own. The official languages live a separate life above
the mass, forming the idiom of a small body of wealthy people. And
even that idiom has two forms, the written and the spoken form, which
are very different. It is odd how unnatural spoken English looks, for
instance, when it appears in a book; and I suppose the public are right
to prefer the wholly unreal written English put into the mouths of the
characters in novels.
I remember one good woman who made a very large income for many
years by writing books about lords and ladies in London, which books
she sold to an extensive and eager public in England, but to a much
more extensive, and far more eager public in the United States. In
these books, which were in their time very famous, the ladies and
gentlemen—the toffs—talked in the most astonishing manner: all in
linked phrases of some inches, and dependent clauses hanging on.
There was one character in one of her books which I was assured
was a friend of mine: a young hereditary politician. I know the
man’s conversation well enough: it is of the ordinary sort, chopped
sentences, grunts, continual repetitions and, in general, brief scraps:
such language as you and I and everybody talks. But in the book this
authoress, who knew the original well enough and lived all her life
among lords and ladies, made the poor fellow talk in his own house like
Hansard. She would make him spout great speeches at his own mother and
deliver sentences of prodigious length in the midst of them.
I myself once wrote a book about politicians, called ‘A Change in
the Cabinet.’ It was universally agreed in all that old world of
professional politicians who were still educated men that my book,
whether good or bad, was monstrously accurate to the way the people of
that world talk and go on. But the book will never be held by any large
public to be accurate; or, at any rate, will not satisfy the desire of
the large public for a particular kind of pompous convention, such as
never was by sea or land. And on the whole I think the large public are
right. Literature has no business to be a mirror of life. We can see
life for ourselves without literature. What literature ought to do,
I take it, is to make a type or expression of life, which is quite a
different thing from a mere reflection, and what is more, literature
is there for fun and not for copying. Hence the greatest of human
writings have very little relation to actual speech. The heroes of the
poet Homer say things as satisfactory as have ever been said, yet they
say them in a highly conventional and stilted way, using a very small
vocabulary and (what is really extraordinary!) talking all the time in
hexameters. Certainly no one ever did that in real life except an old
don whom I used to know at Oxford.
This man spoke with a dactylic stammer, thus: ‘Wúggă-gă, zúggă-gă,
úggĕr-gă Năggă-gă, Wúggă-ă, Húggĕr-gă.... In my ... wúgga ga ...
d-dúgga-g—opinion.’
He was the only living person I have ever heard who gave the effect of
speaking in ordinary life as the persons of the poets speak. It was
well worth hearing; but, of course, one could not understand a word of
it. Nor did he ever produce the great effects of the ancients.
One of the most delightful things about words is their habit of coming
up out of nothing, like the little particles of ice which float to the
surface of the Thames at the beginning of a frost, rising silently,
floating up from the bottom of the river, or like the little oak trees
that crop up everywhere like weeds in the fields of my home. ‘Boy’ is
a word of that kind; ‘girl’ is another; ‘leg’ is another; ‘donkey’ is
another; ‘plough,’ though a little earlier, is another. No one can tell
you where they came from; they are like our modern masters, they have
no ancestry. But, unlike our modern masters, they remain. Some one in
some clique started the expression and it spread. One can see examples
of the process going on all round one to-day. One sometimes even knows
the man who invented a new term and the medium through which it spread.
There are one or two Eton words of this sort, and one or two Balliol
words which are in the way of becoming regular English; for individual
men of large acquaintance and fertile mind started these new words,
some of which are beginning to take root.
But of all things that words do, what pleases me most is their habit
of adventure; the way they have of sitting tight and doing nothing but
their ordinary job for centuries, and then shooting out and taking
quite different work and travelling about, changing colour and shape as
they go.
I am very fond of the word ‘cad.’ It is the most useful missile in the
English language. It is very hard and knobby, and you can be certain
of your effect. And yet how brief its career! How singular its arrival
at its present exalted state! It is a shortened form of ‘cadet,’ the
younger son of a great family, which came by extension to apply to
the less fortunate. It wandered about in this vague form for about a
lifetime, and then settled down into two separate uses, applying to a
particular sort of domestic, I believe, in one of the universities, and
also to the people who used to hang on at the back of the old horse
omnibuses and take the money in those happy days of my youth when there
were no bell punches and no uniforms, and all Charing Cross resounded
to the cry of ‘Liverpool Street,’ towards which goal every omnibus cad
entreated you.
‘Cad,’ having settled down on these two honourable but ill-paid
occupations, slyly got in by a side door and established itself in
a totally different meaning, which it has now achieved, and which
it looks like keeping. For now it means: ‘A male deficient in one
particular small set of those many moral qualities which, when combined
with the national tradition of wealth, build up what is called in
England a “gentleman”.’ That is what the word ‘cad’ means to-day,
and that is what gives it its value. It is a very odd formation. The
‘gentleman’ is the ideal of our once aristocratic and now plutocratic
English state; it is the ideal which members of the wealthier governing
class must conform to or attempt to attain. That ideal (its worshippers
will be surprised to hear) has not a few vices, a number of virtues,
and a very great many habits or characters which are neither virtuous
nor vicious—such as the accent.
Now the cad is not at all a man who lacks all these; he is only a
man who lacks one particular set of the many virtues. He lacks the
particular kind of reticence and the particular kind of generosity
which go to the making of the character called ‘a gentleman.’ He may
have a reticence of another kind, and a generosity of another kind, and
still be a cad. On the whole, of the cads and gentlemen I have met, I
would give the cads a shade of odds in the matter of salvation; which
is not without its importance either.
It will be interesting to watch the process of the word and see
what happens to it. I do not think it will last long, for the whole
civilisation to which it applies and in which it has a meaning is
breaking up, like mist before a rising wind. It is not a word you could
translate into any other language, and the English society to which it
attaches is changing in a whirl. I wonder what posterity will make of
it? What will posterity make of this strange habit, suddenly arisen
within fifty years (and soon to die), of regarding a particular sort
of provincial wealthy man as a general ideal for all humanity, and
of regarding a man lacking somewhat of that ideal’s qualities as the
basest of mankind?
Probably posterity will do what we all do in dealing with the past,
shrug its shoulders and pass on. We, in dealing with any part of the
past which we cannot understand, treat it at once as ridiculous, or
only talk of the things in it which we do sympathise with. So will
posterity deal with us. We cannot understand at all, for instance, the
mood of a man who—like nearly everybody up to about two hundred years
ago—objected to being burnt alive not on account of the pain, but
because it was an indignity; because the body was consumed. We cannot
understand why he was not more concerned with the serious discomfort of
being burnt alive than with the ignominy.
In the eighteenth century, men could not understand the theological
discussions of the early Byzantine period. We are getting a little
more sympathetic with them now, but even to-day there are a great many
highly cultured men steeped in history who cannot reconstruct for
themselves at all the state of mind in which the populace lost its
temper over a theological point; and the usual attitude of those who